Former hockey player Wyatt Russell tries acting

From the moment Wyatt Russell stepped onto the ice, he felt as if he had a target on his back. His hair was long and blond, and his parents were Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

When Wyatt was 16, he and his family left Pacific Palisades to travel to Canada, where he trained to play professional hockey. The young athlete's teammates spread rumors that his parents had bought his spot on the roster. Others claimed that Russell's coach lived with him.

During his first game, a player threatened to rip his head off and knock his teeth down his throat so that it would be written up in People magazine. That kind of reception quickly toughened him up.

"It gave me a backbone," Russell says. "I spent so much time trying to prove to people that that was the exact opposite of what I was trying to be."

So he did his best to ignore the taunting. He put his head down and worked, eventually earning the respect of his teammates. And yet now, at 27 -- after so many years of trying to distance himself from his parents' celebrity and careers -- he finds himself in the Hollywood game.

Russell's first major role in a studio film is as a football player named Zook in "22 Jump Street," one of the summer's big comedies. This sequel to the 2012 action comedy "21 Jump Street" stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as undercover cops sent to a college to bust a drug ring. The Russell character is a frat bro who forms a quick bond with Tatum's character.

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The pair spend time together bench-pressing and comparing their puka shell necklaces. Russell's comic take on the dumb jock has prompted some critics to compare him to a young Owen Wilson.

Acting seemed like a natural career choice for Russell. Not only did his parents pursue that career, but so did two of his half-siblings, Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson.

But Russell fell in love with hockey when he first encountered the sport at age 4. Before the move to Canada, he'd commute 90 minutes to Lakewood every day after school to practice at a rink.

"The last thing I wanted to do was act, because it was the path of least resistance," he says over coffee. "And it was rebelliousness. Acting was what everybody thought I should do, and at 15, when you love something (else) so much, it's like -- 'That's not what I do. That's what they do.'"

After his stint in Canada, he went on to junior leagues as a goalie, which he liked, in part because his mask allowed him to hide his face. But by 19, he'd already suffered five concussions. During one incident, his head was rammed into the post and then hit the back of the ice. He thought he'd broken his neck.

It was only then that he began to consider working in the movie business. He decided to sign up for a six-week summer directing course at USC.

"That class opened the door for me," he says. "I realized I was allowed to like this," he says. Yet even after that revelation, he wasn't ready to give up hockey. He decided to move to Holland, where he played for two more years. Hawn was too nervous to watch his games anymore.

"It was dumb," Russell admits. "But the risk was worth taking for me to finish that part of my life. I didn't want to look back -- or be sitting in some bar watching a game -- and think, 'Ugh, I could have been there.' "

He finally quit and moved to Marina del Rey, living with a couple of buddies. He began auditioning and landed a small role in "Cowboys & Aliens" as well as some indie films, including the recently opened thriller "Cold in July."

His tryout for "22 Jump Street" was a huge leap. "We were aware of his acting lineage -- and it was hard not to notice the resemblance when he walked into the room," says Phil Lord, one of the film's directors. "But he was so natural and had this very casual charm to him that didn't feel actor-y or canned. We had a lot of people audition for that part, and Wyatt had the most ease about him. He was the most lovable."

Later, the production flew Russell to Chicago, so he could hang with Tatum. "Even though he never played football, he just carries himself like an athlete," Tatum writes in an e-mail. "He was totally committed to looking like a high-level college football player, and he did a great job. He really crushed it. That's the competitive streak he still has from his days as a hockey player."

Russell says he's slowly discovering just how much fun acting can be, and he's hoping that "22 Jump Street" will "let people know that this is what I want to do for a career."

Meanwhile, he and his brother Oliver are developing a show for HBO, and Russell and his wife -- stylist Sanne Hamers, whom he met four years ago at a salsa bar in Holland -- live in an upscale mobile home in Malibu, which they share with Russell's other half-brother, Boston, and two dogs.

Now he and his dad, actor Kurt Russell, have even more in common. "Recently, my dad has been teaching me a lot -- like how to read a script," he says. "It used to just be about hockey or baseball or sports or whatever. We don't have glitzy or glamour-y Hollywood-type talk, like, 'Isn't that person great?' It's more about the process of how it works. He's dedicated a lot of his life, obviously, to doing those types of things, and I'd be stupid not to take advantage of it."